The Oklahoma City Thunder spent three straight seasons as the Western Conference's No. 1 seed, won a championship in 2025 and pushed to within a game of the Finals again this spring. Now, ESPN's Tim McMahon says, the bill is coming due.
Speaking on NBA Today after the Thunder's Game 7 Western Conference finals loss to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs, McMahon laid out an offseason defined less by basketball than by balance sheets.
"We've got to start with what is the financial pain threshold for Clay Bennett, their majority owner, and that ownership group," McMahon said. "This is a team that has not paid luxury tax for the last six seasons — including, obviously, three years as a contender and one championship team."
That run of frugality is about to end. The show noted that Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams combined to account for just 13% of the team's cap this season; next year, with their extensions kicking in, the two will swallow roughly 50% of the cap. Add in reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's share — about another 25% — and Oklahoma City's big three alone will eat up close to 75% of the books.
"They're going to be deep into luxury tax with the extensions for Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams kicking in," McMahon said. "They're going to vault into Second Apron territory."
The Second Apron is the punitive upper tier of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement, a threshold that sharply restricts how teams can add salary, use trade exceptions and build out a roster — the league's way of taxing sustained spending.
The most pressing roster questions, McMahon said, sit in the front court, and they are sharpened by the prospect of seeing Wembanyama every postseason for the next decade.
"Isaiah Hartenstein has a team option, Lu Dort has a team option," McMahon said. "I'm told it's extremely, extremely likely that Hartenstein's back. Going up against Victor Wembanyama likely every year now, you don't want to thin out your front-court depth."
Dort's situation is thornier. McMahon said the veteran wing's future is "a little bit more murky," in part because Oklahoma City has a potential ready-made replacement in Cason Wallace, who is himself extension-eligible this summer.
There is, however, a human counterweight to the cold math. McMahon said Gilgeous-Alexander — who claimed both MVP and Finals MVP in 2025, the first player to win both in the same season since LeBron James with the Heat — told him he would give the front office no input on personnel. McMahon suspects that was diplomacy.
"Shai was playing a little bit coy there," McMahon said. "He will at least remind Sam Presti and the Thunder management just how much he values having Lu Dort as his teammate."
The two are tied for the longest tenure on the roster and spend their summers together with Canada's national team.
For all the dread baked into the luxury-tax projections, the Thunder's core remains young, decorated and locked in. The question general manager Sam Presti faces is not whether this group is good enough — it is how much owner Clay Bennett is willing to pay to keep it together, now that staying elite finally comes with a tax bill.
